Rand Simberg wrote:
On Mon, 09 May 2005 04:49:24 GMT, in a place far, far away, Scott
Lowther made the phosphor on my
monitor glow in such a way as to indicate that:

Shuttle is currently about $400M per launch.

That's not a meaningful number. Marginal cost is much less, and
average cost is much more, at expected flight rates.

Shuttle-C or similar would not be more.

It would be if the launch rate is lower.

Right.

Take the number of people employed building, training,
stacking, launching, recovering, and refurbishing a
launch system, multiply that by $100K, then multiply
that result by about 2-3 or so, and you get a rough
estimate of the total costs of running the launch
program for one year. At low launch rates - which
is what NASA human launch systems are always going
to operate at, this cost won't vary much with the
number of launches. The best way to cut costs is to
reduce the number of workers.

The current shuttle budget is about $4.5 billion per
year, which translates to $750 million per launch if
there are six launches in a year, or $1.125 billion
per if there are four launches, or $4.5 billion per
launch if there is one flight, etc. But note that
this is the combined launch and mission costs, which
includes feed and care of astronauts, cleaning the
shuttle toilet, processing the payloads, etc.. It's
not that much when you consider that Titan IV Milstar
missions (for an unmanned communications satellite -
no astronauts to care for) cost more than $1 billion
each.

So to get the costs for a shuttle-derived system down
to something reasonable - say $400 million per flight
at four launches per year - NASA would have to establish
a program that only employed around 6,500 (total, for
everything from factory to control center to parking
lot security, etc). This is only about one-third of the
total currently involved in the space shuttle program.
(Or it could employ the same number of workers at 1/3rd
the pay.)

- Ed Kyle